CGI animation

Here are both versions of my CGI animation to accompany the dissertation and counterpart the stop-motion version:

In the first test the sheep had a very rudimentary and un-educated rig which produced a deforming effect when ever I moved a limb, this became very distracting. because the legs were the only part that were rigged meant that when a leg was moved the rest of the body would move with it. But what informed my theoretical work the most was the texturing element of this animation, as I used photographs taken from the stop-motion set to incorporate into the UV maps of the CGI model, this gave the model a more tangible feel and contradicted some of the research I did through Barry Purves where he said with digital animation all textures have to be made from scratch, but with this techniques stop-motion set design and CGI can go hand in hand. But as always it still looked very CGI which also supports some of the research I did for the theory where practitioners were trying to describe the way one can always tell when something is CGI. 

I decided to re-rig the sheep in this next version which helped achieve a better performance from the character with much less deformation due to the bone structure going throughout the character rather than just in its legs. This process informed my theory very much due to its troubleshooting nature, it backed up much of my secondary research and informed me about the technical and fastidiousness when creating all these assets and animating in Maya by using the graph editor to edit the in-betweens, for example I wanted the sheep to look like he was hitting the ground with every hop, so I manipulated the tangents associated with the y translation of the model to land a bit harsher giving a more convincing performance. This also informed my theoretical studies due to the very different ways of animating, the straight ahead style of stop-motion being a fairly destructive way of animating whereas CGI being very technical and one can skip between in-betweens and correct even the slightest of detail without having to reset the character in stop motion and film a whole section again which costs time and money!